Our latest murder mystery comes from the pen of Nick Brown, but who is he and why is he making your weekend extra fun?

Nick’s a man of many eras and regions. He’s worked in Nepal and trekked to Mount Everest, studied in Brighton and worked in Warsaw, so it’s only natural he’d write about someone who’d travelled widely. Step forward Cassius Corbulo, the ‘Agent of Rome’ whose adventures in the Roman Empire are now up to six volumes. Cassius is a ‘frumentarii’, a military officer who performs secret service roles and a position which really existed. Nick knows how to blend the facts and fascinating fiction.

Nick’s influences are from a range of genres, be they Ian Fleming’s cunning spies or Michael Crichton’s visions of a world gone wrong, and for us Nick has gone back a few years to plot the murder of the Kray Twins. But Nick doesn’t just write historical, as his science fiction can be found in a collection called ‘Dead Eyes’. We assume, given his penchant for travel, that Nick would find his way onto the moon if possible.

We asked Nick what the biggest challenge in moving between eras was: “Capturing the atmosphere and attitudes of that time and place… staying faithful to the known facts wherever possible.” You don’t need to know about the Krays to enjoy our mystery, but there’s a few ‘Easter Eggs’ if you do.

Finally, what crime writer does Nick rate the most? “Michael Connelly - he never wastes a word and builds in twists you don't see coming.”

Nick’s Agent of Rome series, as well as Dead Eyes, are available now on Amazon.

Some deaths are easy for the police and coroners to solve. Some deaths remain frustrating for a long time because of circumstances that are difficult but explainable, like a murderer acting in a way that avoids detection… and some deaths are just darn mysterious from the start.

Elisa Lam and the LiftIn 2013, Elisa Lam disappeared. She was Canadian, a student, and staying at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles when she vanished. The police were informed and a search began. However, it was only a few weeks later, when a maintenance team tried to work out why people were complaining about the water, they her body was found in the tank. She was naked, and her clothes were nearby.

This is a tragic case, but it had already become an immensely strange one - an autopsy found no evidence of foul play and suggested an accidental death, however when the police went looking for Elisa they checked CCTV footage. And they found something...

Elisa was in a distressed state, coming in and going out of the lift heading to the water tank, gesturing and arguing with someone… someone who isn’t captured on any camera. The police could never work out what Elisa was doing, what was wrong, who she was arguing with, just that she died a short while later in a very strange way.

42 Days LaterFebruary 8th 1981, and a body is found in Golden Gate Park. It’s Leroy Carter Jr, and he’d been sleeping there, his body now wrapped in a sleeping bag. I’ve said body twice now, because as much as the police searched, they couldn’t find a head, which had been sliced off and taken. It’s about then that the police discovered parts of a chicken, and vegetable matter, which had been left at the scene in a weird way.Step forward Sandi Gallant, a cop with an interest in occult crimes. She theorises the killing is part of a Santeria ritual, and suggests the head will be used in strange practices and then returned forty two days later as a way of completing the ritual. The thing is, even Gallant didn’t really believe this, and Golden Gate Park wasn’t put under twenty four hour surveillance.

Which is a shame, as 42 later the head was placed there. Needless to say, no one was ever caught.

Dyatlov PassThe Ural Mountains, a part of the world famed for being difficult to reach. A perfect place for a hiking expedition and in February 1959 a group of friends from the Ural Polytechnical Institute had gone ‘ski hiking’ there, because you couldn’t walk it. One of these people was Igor Dyatlov, and the pass is named after him because none of them came back, except the tenth member who left much earlier.

We know they made a camp at the foot of a rise called Kholat Syahkhl. But we do not know why their bodies were found away from this camp, or why they had fled from their tents without their protective clothing. Six of the nine hikers were found dead of hyperthermia, three had signs of physical damage. The search party found the tents first, one cut open from the inside. They found tracks of people without even shoes, running away. It took two months to find every body, as they weren’t together, and the last group to be discovered included those with the physical injuries.

There was no sign of anything else, neither people nor an obvious reason why the group acted like this. Initial suspicious was on local people, but the net spread to full on internet conspiracy including military tests, strange animals and the rather more believable avalanche, although there wasn’t actually any evidence of one...

Francis LeavyFirefighting is still a very risky business, but it was trickier back before World War Two. In Chicago in 1924 you could find a fireman called Francis Leavy - and one day as he was carrying out his station chores everyone else noticed he was in a strange mood. They asked why, and he stopped cleaning a window and said he thought he was going to die that day.

He did, of course. A fire later that day pulled in many firemen, and a structural disaster killed nine of the, including Leavy. Tragic, but not too mysterious…

Until the team got back to the fire station, where they noticed a black hand-print on the window Francis had been cleaning when he’d made his prediction. A hand print they tried desperately to erase, until nothing worked and the station decided to embrace this symbol and kept it, until the window broke and had to be replaced entirely.

Mary ReeserYou’ll have to indulge us here, as there are several theories which claim to explain Spontaneous Human Combustion, but as this is one of the events that scared us as kids, we’re going to mention it.

On July 2nd, 1951, the landlady of Mary Reeser’s apartment realised the doorknob was very hot. When the police entered to see why they found Mary Reeser had burned into ash, as had the chair she’d been sitting in. But… one of her legs was intact, and the heat required to burn someone to that state was so high why was the rest of the room mostly fine?

Officially, Reeser’s lit cigarette burned her when she was on sleeping pills, but you always wonder… surely the whole place would have caught fire if something that strong was happening to a body? And Mary Reeser is merely emblematic of many, many strange deaths where a body is burned but little else is: Spontaneous Human Combustion.

The Internet is a great place to find mysteries - and the way international researchers can come together so easily, has meant communities dedicated to many different topics can quickly take shape. For instance, if you want to study Jack the Ripper, casebook.org is your starting point. But sometimes, the Internet can produce the mysteries all by itself...

Jeff the KillerJeff the Killer is the name of… something in a photograph which has done the rounds of the web. A clearly photoshopped image, this distorted human face is the basis for a legend of a person whose face was burned off (with acid) and who creeps around in closets. A large meme / culture has been built around stories of Jeff, and what he has been up to...mainly adhering to the grand tradition of scaring teenagers.

But that’s not the mystery. What’s odd about this is where the photo came from, and what might be a genuine tragedy behind it. As far as Internet researchers have found – and if there’s one thing people like to do on the web beyond coo over kittens pictures it’s research things – the picture is connected to a young woman called Katy Robinson who in 2008 posted a picture which - might - have been photoshopped into Jeff.

And here’s the mystery. Katy also has a story around her, that after being bullied online about her weight, as revealed in photos like the one that became Jeff, she killed herself. It is entirely possible, if likely, that this is all just a metaphor for what the negative aspects of the web can do. But so far, no one knows and Jeff carries on.

Cicada 3301That last story was rather heavy, so here’s an old fashioned puzzle, only couched in recent technology. Cicada 3301 isn’t the name of an insect or a robot cocktail, it’s an organisation which has run six ‘games’ online. These hugely fiendish puzzles involve codes, online security and all the modern tools of cyber warfare - and only hard working and gifted people have cracked them.

One small problem, no one has any idea who Cicada 3301 are. More importantly, we don’t know why they’re doing it. If it’s promotion of a game or project it failed, because no one told us what to buy. If it’s (as they say) to recruit genius codebreakers, we don’t know for who or what they’ll go on and do.

All we know, is that someone is running complex games online, and no one does that for free in the end. Although it’s probably not, as someone suggested, the world’s most elitist cult.

Mortis.comAs far as website names go, Mortis.com doesn’t even sound right does it, it sounds bad. But no one ever found out what was on Mortis.com, beyond two key aspects: a single page with a password no one knew, and a huge amount of data behind it no one ever saw.

Mortis.com caused quite a stir with ‘concerned’ web users - and when it was discovered people tried to find out what was hidden beyond that single locked page. But as hard as they tried, all they found a series of websites, each with no discernible purpose.

And then the FBI took a look and Mortis.com disappeared… the mystery went with it.

SlendermanIn a sense, Slenderman shouldn’t be a mystery, as later folklorists will easily be able to find the origins of this creation: Eric Knudsen, user of the frequently creative Something Awful forums, created the Slenderman character: a black suited man with no face, with arms and legs which stretch out and fade as does his body. A nightmare figure associated with torment, harassment, kidnapping and the occult, with attacks on children. A definitely fake figure.

Slenderman was such a perfect piece of mythology that it exploded across the web, inspiring websites, video games, short films and more. It’s a twenty first century success story when it comes to making something up. It was the Internet making it’s own folklore. And then, of course, it all went wrong. Horribly wrong.

May 31st, 2014, and two twelve year old girls in Wisconsin take a journey into the woods with their classmate. Only two walked out, because someone had stabbed the third member of this group repeatedly and she had to crawl to safety. The police were in no doubt and arrested the other girls, who confessed because they wanted to become servants of Slenderman. Obviously there is no real Slenderman, but the question of what really made two twelve year girls stab a friend is currently hanging in the air as the trials of the two are happening later this year (2017).

Webdriver TorsoAnd now, a cheat. This mystery has been solved, but it was such a great thrill at the time we have to tell you about it. Basically, someone was uploading loads of really strange videos to YouTube, including strange blocks of colours, creating a vast body of completely esoteric and almost post-modernist art, although that’s being generous and we actually mean...crazy stuff.

People went mad trying to work it out. Was it messages from spies? Was it aliens? Was it… insert pretty much everything. No one cracked it until one dedicated genius (or person with far too much time on their hands) worked it out and got a confession from Google: it was a series of test videos they used to check quality, and they’d stayed silent as the mystery raged.

​No one is naive enough to think that TV detectives get things right all the time. Real life is confused and complicated, and there are plenty of mysteries, from deaths to sightings to strange numbers. But sometimes you see a mystery and can’t help but think things didn’t go as you might expect…

The Killer of Ken McElroyOn June 10th 1981, a man called Ken McElroy was killed in Skidmore, Missouri, as he sat in his truck. He was killed by the gunfire of two people, but luckily there were over forty witnesses to the killing. There must have been an easy case for the police to make right?…

Wrong! Actually, no one was ever convicted, because every single person denied witnessing anything.

Ken McElroy was not a popular man you see. He had been charged twenty one times for crimes ranging from assault to paedophilia, and was almost universally hated. In 1980 he’d accidentally shot a shopkeeper while trying to not-so-accidentally threaten him and got out on appeal. This led to him appearing, heavily armed, in a bar, threatening people, and meant on June 10th the townsfolk of Skidmore had gathered to discuss with the sheriff what to do to defend themselves.

Apparently, they decided not to mention his murder…

The Bear Brook MurdersOn November 10th, 1985, a hunter in Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire (USA) found a metal drum. It was capable of holding fifty gallons of liquid, but sadly in this instance was discovered to contain two bodies, one of an adult woman, the other a young girl - a subsequent examination discovered they were related. To this day the identities have never been discovered, and no murderer was ever caught, despite the bodies clearly having been killed. Normally, that might be where things ended. But in 2000 another metal drum was discovered…

The second drum was found one hundred feet from the first drum. Yes, another 55 gallon drum, and inside two more bodies, this time both of children, one of which was related to the first couple. This fact suggests the drum had been sat there for the whole of the 1985 investigation, and the fifteen years after, but was missed. Still, DNA could only say the woman was related to two of the children, but not how, so a mother, aunt, etc., and no one knows who they are.

The likeliest solution came via the DNA discovery that the fourth child, unrelated to the rest, was likely the daughter of Robert Evans, a convicted murderer… but he died in 2010 before any case could be put or any evidence found.

“America's Unknown Child”You may be aware that speed is vital in solving crimes - if you can get to evidence early things get a lot better for the police. Hold that thought.

In winter 1957, a man in woods near Fox Chase, Philadelphia made a terrible discovery: a JC Penny box, containing the body of a young boy wrapped only in a blanket. But the man who made the discovery wasn’t a dog walker out in the woods, he was actually trapping animals - and he was so scared the police would be angry at him, that he left the box and didn’t say anything. Luckily the next person to find it would report it right?…

Actually they didn’t. A few days passed when a young man who claimed he was interested in animals (but was actually more interested in spying on the girls in a nearby residential school) found the box, but of course didn’t say anything either because of his own wrong doing - so he left it too and only reported it later when conscience got the better of him.

Police searched far and wide to find the identity of the boy, let alone who killed him and put him in a box, but both came to nothing. To this day he lives up to his reputation as American’s "Unknown Child". Whether vital clues were lost in the delay we will never know.

The Brass Handles MurdersThe Brass Handles Murders are the ultimate in a community sticking together, but really in the worst way possible. In March 2006 two small time gangsters walked into a pub in Salford, intent on a bit of gangland killing. Richard Austin and Carlton Alverange took guns into the place during a busy football match, using a spotter to direct them. But when people realised, the regulars in the bar pulled the guns away from the killers, shot them and dumped them outside, where they died.

It was a busy pub, filled with people watching football, but you’ve been reading this article for a few minutes so you know where this is going....

No witnesses.CCTV missing.Everyone mysteriously ducking or looking the other way.

The man the killers had tried to assassinate had been wounded, but survived, and the man who arranged it fled abroad, but was caught and locked up. Alive.

Tara Calico and the PolaroidTara Calico vanished in 1988 while out riding a bike near her home in New Mexico. What happened next spawned one of the most gut-wrenching mysteries and photographs of the modern era.

On June 15th 1989 a woman shopping in Port St. Joe, Florida, found a Polaroid photo on the ground. She picked it up, and found an image of two bound and gagged people staring back at her, a young woman and a young boy. Some later attempts unofficially identified the lady as Tara Calico, but the identity of the young boy is still unknown. Why a photo of two bound people was lying on the car park asphalt no one knows, but she rang the police and got a description of the vehicle the photo was with: a white Toyota van with no windows and a mustachioed driver.

Police set up road blocks, but the van was never seen again. No answer was ever given to why that picture was taken, if it was connected to the van, if it was really Tara or what happened between her disappearance and after. Just a picture of two people desperately staring out that was found by total chance and didn’t lead to anything. Whoever they were, they were lost.

Well that's it for this week folks - we're writing more as we speak. Thanks for checking-in and please give us a like if you enjoyed it.

P.S - If you've still not grabbed your ticket to one of our Manhunt events, there's still time to put that right here: Manhunt Event tickets